Lead Stories

Phyllis Thomas, Enterprise Editor

SCORES OF young adults who are 18 years and over are still being kept in state-run homes even though, by law, they should be released.

This has left administrators and caregivers at these state-run homes in a quandary as to what to do with the young adults.

With many having nowhere to go or relatives to take them, some are being used as cheap labour; others are shipped to rural communities to provide company for elderly people while some remain part of the statistics in the resource-starved homes.

It is a situation which has the usually calm Children's Advocate, Mary Clarke, in a state of controlled anger. She has company in some of the managers of these homes whose frustration has soared to immeasurable heights.

"Is the Government responsible for persons in need generally? When does the Government's responsibility end?" questioned Clarke.

And Major Sheila Booth moaned, "It's a drain on the institution. I don't know where else to turn."

Booth is the administrator of the Nest Children's Home on Mannings Hill Road, St Andrew, where six of the wards, two males and four females, are 18 years old and older.

childcare survey

The Office of the Children's Advocate last week conducted a survey of 19 of the childcare facilities across the island and found a total of 84 wards, 18 years old and above.

The Office of the Children's Advocate found 38 males and 46 females, including a 30-year-old who should have been out of the institution 12 years ago.

The survey found that several of these young adults have no skills and nowhere else to go.

The handful who are skilled gained a level of knowledge in trades like woodwork, an industry which they believe the final rites were said long ago with the influx of imported furniture on the local market.

A few are in tertiary institutions or are seeking entry to same.

The Nest Children's Home, for example, employs two of these males as security guards at the gate of the facility. But there is no security of tenure for these workers as Booth said, "I am not sure how long that will continue."

Nevertheless, for all those who are housed at the Nest, she said, "I am going to try in every way possible to keep them. They have been here all their lives and I cannot allow them to be left out in the cold."

But even as administrators like Booth try to implement stopgap measures, the State seems to have turned its back on overage residents, ignoring recommendations made by the children's advocate on how to deal with the situation.

The Government also seems to be ignoring the recommendations of a task force it set up to examine the state of children in the care of the State.

Clarke's proposals include the setting up of halfway or transitional houses that would keep the wards of the State for a period after they reach 18 and prepare them for the conditions of society.

In the meantime, the houses continue to creek under the pressure that these residents present.

In some instances, the administrators of the state-run children homes have to deal with the indiscipline of these wards who, because they are no longer children, fail to follow instructions.

One caregiver told The Sunday Gleaner, "They challenge us. They are not children. It's adults we are dealing with and they don't follow rules or set example for the others."

The situation exists throughout the entire system including foster homes which, Clarke noted, also do not have to keep wards after age 18.

nudged government

Clarke, on July 7, once again nudged the Government about the condition of the residents in state homes.

In a letter addressed to Carla Francis-Edie, chief executive officer of the Child Development Agency, and copied to Patricia Sinclair McCalla, CEO of the Public Sector Transformation Unit in the Office of the Prime Minister, Clarke referred to eight such 18-year-olds being held at the Elsie Bemand Girl's Home in Meadowbrook, St Andrew.

She reminded them of the recommendations made to the 'Honourable Prime Minister Task Force on Children in the Care of the State'.

Those recommendations included the introduction of the halfway houses.

An obviously frustrated children's advocate, swamped by correspondents to the Government on issues surrounding children, drowning in pages of minutes of meetings from one committee to the next on matters of children, with recommendations after recommendations and with Government's response being no response, is convinced that the State is not doing the best that it can for children.

phyllis.thomas@gleanerjm.com